Hey, Wanna Walk the Dog?

Bob Odenkirk warns me about the dog park during the twenty-minute drive from his house in the Hollywood Hills to Laurel Canyon.

"I'm just going to tell you that the dog walkers are there, and they tend to have, like, twenty dogs each. And they're really nice people, they do their best, but sometimes they...Olive's pretty good on her own, but I have to watch her, because if there are too many dogs, it can be dangerous. She loves to play, she runs up to each dog, and she gets too many of them going."

Olive's a meek, milk-faced doll—part pit, part German shepherd, part corgi, one white ear, one brown—fetching, all in all. Odenkirk's less so—a fifty-three-year-old Everyman-looking, son-of-a-bitch-playing sketch-comedy god who turned a three-episode role as criminal shyster Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad into a dark and glorious four-season romp, and then into Better Call Saul, the brilliant BB spin-off about to start its second season on February 15 on AMC.

Bob Odenkirk won my heart in 1993 playing Larry Sanders's lizard of an agent on The Larry Sanders Show, but he'd already spent four seasons writing for Saturday Night Live by then; a lad from suburban Chicago, he'd left college to learn improv and studied with Del Close, the late Second City guru who inspired two generations of students like Bill Murray and Stephen Colbert. In 1995, Odenkirk and David Cross created Mr. Show with Bob and David, whose thirty half-hour episodes, spread over four seasons, rank with Monty Python's Flying Circus and SCTV as the very best sketch comedy ever televised.

None of that—nor his indelible work as "Porno Gil" in the third episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm's first season—lifted Odenkirk above cult status. Even now, after a lead-actor Emmy nomination for Saul, he's not much for stardom.

"I'm not twenty-one. I'm not trying to plot my trajectory to George Clooney status. I'm going, 'Let's enjoy this thing I've got'—which is one of the best-written roles on TV, if not the best. Let's enjoy this now, for what it is, for as long as it lasts. My deal with this business was if I can eat and feed my family, I'm good; I wasn't driven to do anything more than that, except to make what I love. That would be the greater desire, always—to make things that I love. Not a lot of people get to do that. My life is hanging out with my family, taking the dog to the dog park, and working."

Emily Shur

I'm not twenty-one. I'm not trying to plot my trajectory to George Clooney status.

The dog park is just off Mulholland Drive. Odenkirk wheels his Prius into the parking lot. It's a big dog park, three parched packed-dirt acres circled by steep hills covered in scrub. A couple dozen dogs, a handful of people, plenty of sun. Too much sun, but that's L.A. midday.

"We're going to do our best here," he says as we depart the car.

Don't fret about me, Bob. Dog guy all the way.

"Yeah. But if we find that this is not conducive, we'll give her fifteen minutes, then we'll go."

A few dogs are huddling just inside the gate when Odenkirk unlatches it. He opens it a skosh, and one of them, an Irish setter, bolts and runs across the parking lot.

"Shit!" Odenkirk hollers at some bearded yutz—not a rare breed in L.A.—who's standing a few yards beyond the gate, inside the park: "Hey! One of your dogs just ran out!"

"Not ours," says the guy.

"Whose fuckin' dog is this?" Odenkirk shouts.

"Well, you let it out," says the guy.

"Okay," Odenkirk snarls. "Great."

"You did," the guy says.

The setter's tearing up the nearest hill, hell-bent. Odenkirk hands me Olive's leash and takes off after him. A few other dog walkers come ambling toward the gate. A mellow bunch: L.A. dog walkers, pros, young and middle-aged masters of the craft. This sort of stuff is all in a day's work for them, a nice little break from their screenplays and mood enhancers, plus a few bucks. Nothing to get hung up about.

"Well, he's like, 'Whose fuckin' dog is this?' and he let the dog go," the yutz says to me.

I know, bro. He's just upset. He's not angry.

Olive's aggravated too. She wants no part of the dog park without Odenkirk. She's whimpering for him, pulling toward the hill, scanning the rise. Like the setter, Odenkirk's long gone, up the hill, out of sight.

It takes a while before the woman who came with the setter makes her way over. She's shading her eyes with one arm, looking up the hill.

"Did anybody see how it happened?" she asks.

It's our fault, I tell her. As soon as we opened the gate, he dashed out.

"Dammit," she says. "And he doesn't have his GPS on."

By now, there's a collection of walkers in the parking lot, and considerable ass sniffing among their charges. I'm doing my best to soothe Olive, but she's still pulling and crying, inconsolable. Jesus. Everyone's a Method actor here.

"I would start calling his name," someone offers.

"The thing is, when he runs out? He runs even farther away when I call his name."

The setter's name is Mick. I start calling up the hill for him. I spot Odenkirk, a flyspeck up along the crest, a far stretch rimmed with fancy homes.

"You should call your friend back and tell him to quit chasing him," one walker advises. "If he hasn't come to him, he's not going to come to him now. He could be scaring him away even farther."

I don't have his number. I just met him.

"Oh my God!" a walker screams. "There he is!"

"He's all the way up there," another says.

"I don't see him," says Mick's walker.

Emily Shur

We all start bellowing Mick's name. He's on the crest, loping east. I can't see Odenkirk. Every dog is yelping now, save brokenhearted Olive, who has taken to the curb with the vapors. One walker notices me talking into my recorder.

"Are you gonna make your friend look bad?"

I'm gonna make him look good.

"How are you gonna make him look good?"

Because it'll have a happy ending.

"Maybe not," she says.

She's right. The homes on yonder ridge must line a street. There will be cars up there, and plenty of landscaping trucks. Mick might get hit. Hell, Bob could get run over too. He's not exactly a dog whisperer.

"I never had a dog in my life," he told me when I met Olive back at the house. "I never cared about dogs. I thought it was all about cats, and I was wrong. Biiiig mistake. I love this dog so much. I'm embarrassed by my years of cat loving."

This goes a long way toward explaining how Bob coaxed Olive into the Prius:

"Hey, baby. Are you gonna get in the car today? Or are you not gonna want to? C'mon, boo. Here, babe. Come on, baby."

That's cat-guy shit. Dogs want no wooing; they crave leadership. Anyhow, none of this would've happened if he'd let me visit him in Albuquerque, where Better Call Saul just finished shooting its season finale. I was jacked up for New Mexico.

"I'm sorry. You were gonna come down, but the last two weeks were so insane. We were shooting fourteen-hour days. Insane."

Hah. All due respect, but that's merely acting. Insane is this: me broiling in my shirt at the Laurel Canyon Dog Park, comforting Bob Odenkirk's dog, who barely has the strength left to whimper.

Relax, I tell Olive. Daddy's coming.

I hope so. All I know for sure is that I've got a two-hour window, the red-eye back to Newark, and Juliet mooning on her leash while her Romeo scours the hillside.

Olive and I hear Odenkirk's voice before we see him. He's behind us, coming through the clump of walkers at the far end of the parking lot, near the porta-potties.

"My fault," he's saying. "No, this is my fault."

Up close, his jeans are caked with dust. He has a gash on the side of one hand. No setter, dead or alive.

"Hi, baby," Odenkirk says to Olive.

Where's Mick?

"He's looking for a way out; he's trying to get farther away. I'm sorry—this screws up the whole afternoon."

No worries. You're helping reinvent the celebrity profile.

"Yeah, well, listen—this is somebody's dog."

Odenkirk heads over to talk to Mick's walker. I whisper sweet nothings to Olive.

"I apologized," he says when he comes back. "What a nightmare. Goddammit—I'm all cut up and shit. I caught up to him, but he wouldn't come to me."

What a dick.

"I'll take that leash. Let's let her walk around a little bit. I'm gonna come back later with some pictures of a setter like that and put them up. Let's talk about something more pleasant, and I'll get back to that nightmare after this. Pretend that didn't happen."

"Can you imagine how upset you'd be if some asshole actor let him go?"

An asshole actor, sure. But you? I'd feel mixed.

"Let's leave it out, okay?"

Christ, there are a lot of bugs.

"Well, there's a lot of good poo here."

A ton of stink.

"I feel so bad. So what do you want to talk about?"

Has Saul Goodman changed what it's like to be Bob Odenkirk?

"I would answer no to that question a lot in the last year and a half, but I'm starting to realize that you're lying if you say that, or you're dumb. I never felt the need to take the people who loveBreaking Bad and shake them by the lapels and go, 'You've got to watch my sketch comedy!' You'd have to search for overlap. Yet you have to admit it changes. Just to be able to connect with that many people, and the kind of honesty that it takes to even play the moments written for me onBetter Call Saul. Maybe for better actors it's not like that, but for me it's a sharing of yourself."

Better actors are hard to find, Bob.

"You'd have to ask Anthony Hopkins. I speak from my limited craft and abilities. I'm cutting myself open a little bit because that's the only way I know how to do it. I don't have shortcuts that get me there in any other way, so what you're saying about 'Does it change who I am to the world, or even who I am in the world?' I would say yeah, it does."

It must be thrilling in the moment, while you're working.

"When you hit it really honestly and you're opposite somebody like Aaron Paul or Bryan Cranston or Michael McKean, it's a wonderful thing, a pretty magical thing. But so much of what you do isnot that intense moment, and that has its own challenge. People don't spend their lives weeping and confronting each other with their deepest truths. They spend a whole lot of time doing small things and having small interactions. You gotta play that true, too. People don't mull their own subtext all day. We do what we do. We want what we want."

"Let's leave," he says. "We could drive around briefly. Would you mind? Might as well. We're here, right? We'll just drive around that neighborhood a little."

We crawl down every street to no avail.

"Let's keep our eyes open. The dog is probably well past any of this. He was doing that dog thing where they just get going and they're not looking back. You get hit by a car like that."

The dog'll be fine, Bob. He's a runner. He'll wear out eventually.

"What else? Let's talk. It's okay, I'm just looking for a dog."

Emily Shur

I know there's a limited amount of stuff that you're able to say about the second season.

"Extremely. Extremely limited."

One question.

"Go ahead. Ask your question."

Does Saul replace the Suzuki Esteem with a better car?

"You don't love the Esteem?"

I think the Esteem was played out after season one. A Mercedes, maybe?

"You will be pleased, and also not pleased. You will be satisfied, and you will be dissatisfied. Your expectations will be met, and then in some ways unmet."

You're telling me that the second season of Better Call Saul is like today?

"Goddammit. I mean, it's not like I didn't see him. But I've just done that a million times. And the dog usually doesn't do anything or the owner goes, 'Hey! Get back here.' Just think how great this day would've been if I didn't lose that dog. Well, we're not going to see him. I'm going to have to go put up pictures. I intend to find that dog."

I'm back at the hotel when Odenkirk calls. He sounds more tired than relieved, but Mick is safe at home.

"I was on the way to put up posters when I pulled over—it occurred to me that I have a pretty big Twitter following, like 370,000 people. So I took a picture of the poster with my phone and tweeted it, and it kicked it into high gear. Some guy had seen the dog just outside the park, so I went over there. I think the owner got another call from someone who had seen the tweet, and she went over there and got it. Anyway, what an adventure. I apologize for the stress."

It's all good for the story, Bob. Canis ex machina.

"Okay, listen—if you want to use it, you can. But the bottom line is I was a dumb shit for opening the gate."

Like there was ever any doubt.

This article originally appears in the February 2016 issue.

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